Beach Recycling

As we have seen recently, Mother Nature is a pretty awesome force. Sometimes she can devastate, as with the floods, cyclones, bush fires, earthquakes and tornadoes in the Antipodes. Sometimes she can majorly disrupt countries across the globe, as with the snowstorms in northern Europe and the US and the volcano in Iceland. But sometimes nature can actually be beneficial, improving an area with its brute force.


We went to one of our favourite beaches on Sunday. It is a lovely, sheltered, sandy cove bordered by rocks at each end and not once have we had to share it with anyone, other than the resident dog who likes to dig up crabs. Its downside is that low tide reveals a swathe of rocks that makes swimming difficult. If you time it right and are there at high tide, there is a nice stretch of water without a single rock but of course high tide doesn’t always occur at a time that you necessarily want to be at the beach. Fancy a swim at 4am? First navigate the dirt track in the dark, then watch out for the sharks, then go to see a shrink as you are clearly not quite right in the head. So, on the days that high tide didn’t coincide with beach-going hours, we had to content ourselves with a mere paddle or lying flat out in the inch of seawater before the start of the rocks. Not unpleasant but not quite the refreshing swim that you so often need when baking under a roasting-hot sun.

However, the beach we arrived at on Sunday had been transformed since last we were there. At first we couldn’t quite put our finger on what it was but when we were in the water, having a lovely swim, we realised. There were far, far less rocks. It was a long way off high tide and yet there were only a smattering of rocks on a huge expanse of flat sand. It was The Husband that clicked what must have happened. When the rains from the most recent cyclone created a surge at high tide, it must have brought with it so much sand that the rocks had been covered. It was only with that realisation that we saw that the beach was definitely higher. The extra sand had raised the beach by a foot or so, creating a feet-friendly sandy beach with hardly any rocks. Amazing. Isn’t nature great? Well, until the next disaster she is anyway.